Page 74 of Ruthlessly Mated
Tailor sidles up alongside me. “Do you think any of this is true?” He murmurs the question to me under his breath, but vampire hearing is so good he might as well have saved his time and just screamed it out.
“It might be explosive. No way to know. He lies.”
“I do,” Alexander says. “I lie. But don’t forget, I also kill.”
We appear to be stuck. Alexander is not just playing with us, he is training us like animals. He is alternately punishing and rewarding us, he is keeping us at his mercy, and when he lets us go, it will be because he thinks we are going to do what he wants. So why not just give him what he wants now.
“What do you want us to do?”
“I want you to go to the city and retrieve the heart. Then you will give it to me.”
“Okay, well, if you want to get the city open, the first thing you will need to do is back down from the siege. You’re panicking the city folk.”
“I can pull my forces back for a time, or I can send them into the city the next time night falls and have you retrieve the truck containing the heart while my forces feed. They are getting quite hungry.”
“We are on the wrong side of the ocean for all of this,” Kita says, still partially dangling from his grasp because he didn’t make the mistake of putting her all the way down.
“I’ll fly you over.”
“In a plane, or will you get a thousand bats to carry us over the waters?”
“Smart ass brat whelp,” Alexander says. “You will continue to suffer for this.”
I can practically see the energy flowing from her to him. Every time she gives him her cocky little attitude, he seems to gleambrighter. I never thought of being a misbehaved terror as being the equivalent of a battery for a vampire, but here we are.
He puts her down. Carefully. He could simply drop her if he wanted to, but of course he doesn’t. He wants to keep her intact so he can keep enjoying her. I breathe a sigh of relief. Tailor, Damon, and I might be disposable, but she is protected.
CHAPTER 15
Conroy
The plane engine hums deep as we cross the ocean. Tailor, Kita, and I are sitting in the back while a vampire pilots us toward our destination under cover of dark.
“Are we really going to go along with his plan?” Kita looks dubious and concerned. “We’re going to hurt a lot of people if we do that. I mean, I know those people suck, and it wouldn’t be a great loss, but I feel like, with my background, I don’t want to do what was done to me. I don’t want to help vampires kill people’s parents.”
“Not everybody deserves to suffer just because most of them do. We need to get the heart out of there. That is all,” Tailor says, ever the voice of rationality.
“Or we blow it up, and then we don’t worry about any of those things anymore, the bigots in Rock City and the maker’s heart, and the vampire. We could explode all our enemies in one big explosion.”
“Wouldn’t that make us evil?” Tailor says dubiously.
“Was our stated purpose ever not to be evil?” I reply.
“Wait.Arewe evil?” Kita cuts in. “Because I have some ideas for if we’re going to be evil.”
“We are not good or evil. We’re largely neutral. We’re trying to look after ourselves. That means we’re going to do what we need to do, and if that means someone else gets hurt, that’s on them. But we’re not going to go out of our way to hurt anyone.”
“Okay. Feels like that’s still an evil answer,” Kita says. She has a slight smirk on her face as she says it, as if she’s enjoying messing with me. “If we’re going to be evil, I think I would be good at it.”
“You would be, but evil has consequences.”
“Consequences like winning, you mean?”
“We are going to get the heart back for the angry vampire, and we are going to go about our business, living our lives, having our babies,” I say. “And that is final.”
Kita
This is entirely out of order. We’re going to suffer for as long as we are in Alexander’s life. He’s going to snatch my mates, and kill my mates. He’s going to put my babies at risk if I have any. He is a true monster.
